Adopt a local cloud philosophy to get the highest security for your data
Maybe it’s time to rethink your view of what Cloud architecture means. Cloud use is cost effective, provides huge operational benefits, AND can be utilised in a secure way.
As someone who has followed the rise of cloud computing for a decade, it’s apparent to me that there are still regional differences in opinion of the safety of cloud infrastructures. The US has a lead over Europe, for example, in cloud adoption, and that is likely down to a multitude of factors:
Vendor push
The majority of players in the enterprise telecommunications space are US companies, and in their drive to maintain market share and profitability, they have all adopted cloud-based approaches for at least part of their portfolio. In turn, the market for enterprise communications software and services in the US is the largest globally, and they have an appetite for new technologies such as cloud that will improve their bottom line.
In addition, most of the SaaS service offerings that are hosted on public clouds use either Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or IBM Cloud - all of which are US corporates who rolled out their platforms in the US first and then the rest of the world.
Openness to new ideas
The tech buyer community is more open to try new ideas in the US. In my opinion, based partly on three years spent earlier in my career living over there, there is a real openness to trying new ideas in the US, compared to a more conservative approach throughout Europe. This tends to lead to the majority of early adopters being in the US region.
Regulatory differences
The regulations governing data security and privacy are less onerous in the US. In addition, the US is such a large market that many of the business transactions take place solely in the US; less scope for cross-border activities.
If you consider the US versus Europe in terms of markets and market regulations, there is certainly more of a single market in the US with Europe being more fragmented, and with varying degrees of concern for data sovereignty; this leads to economies of scale for rollouts to meet a common set of regulations.
Is there a better way?
Yes – in short, what we at Aculab have termed ‘Local Cloud’.
It’s still a cloud infrastructure (not on-premise) thus giving all the benefits of a cloud solution, but the customer is able to control certain aspects such as locality of the data. It’s a cloud that covers one country, rather than being a global cloud where you have no control of where your data is stored or processed.
This type of infrastructure is better in many ways for customers:
- Peace of mind regarding data security
- Ability to maintain and adhere to strict regional regulations for data privacy and location such as the GDPR (EU) or PIPEDA (Canada)
- Less contractual complexity with regard to data privacy – single vendor rather than multiple to deal with to ensure your data is safe
Learn more about our Local Clouds here.
What we at Aculab have learnt in our decade of offering cloud services is that the keys to using cloud in a data-secure way are to know where your data is and to avoid cross-border transits.Aculab Cloud has been architected to comply with strict regulations such as HIPAA, and we have recently obtained our ISO27001 certificate.
Not all clouds are the same, if security is your number one priority, it’s worth searching out a vendor who has the same mindset. Given the choice between a cloud provider who'll keep your data in-country or in-region and one who'll copy it around the world, which would you choose?
Guest blog by Andrew Nicholson, Senior Product Manager at Aculab - Follow Aculab on Twitter and LinkedIn
To read more from #DiversifyingTelecoms Campaign Week check out our landing page here.